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Posts Tagged ‘Space’

Best Mars Images From Orbiter’s First 5 Years

10 Mar
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Dust-Devil Tattoo

NASA's prolific Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter turns five Earth years old Thursday.

Since settling into orbit around the Red Planet on March 10, 2006, MRO has transmitted more data to Earth -- 131 trillion bits and more than 70,000 images so far -- than all other interplanetary missions combined.

After the orbiter finished all its initial science objectives in the first two years, NASA extended its lifetime twice. The extra time let MRO watch Mars change over two-and-a-half Martian years, giving a new picture of a shifting, dynamic planet.

"Each Mars year is unique, and additional coverage gives us a better chance to understand the nature of changes in the atmosphere and on the surface," said Rich Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in a press release. "We have already learned that Mars is a more dynamic and diverse planet than what we knew five years ago. We continue to see new things."

MRO carries six science instruments, including radar that peels back the layers of the Martian surface, a spectrometer that has mapped the mineral content of three-quarters of the planet, and a weather camera that monitors clouds and dust storms.

But the show stopper is the HiRise camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), which can resolve features the size of a beach ball from 180 miles away.

To date, HiRise has snapped more than 18,500 close ups of Mars' canyons, craters and dunes. In honor of MRO's fifth birthday, here are some of our favorites.

Above:

Dust-Devil Tattoo

These twisty trails were traced by dust devils, spinning columns of rising air that pick up loose red dust grains and reveal darker, heavier sand beneath. Dust devils have been blamed for unexpectedly cleaning off the Mars rovers' solar panels. This image was taken Aug. 24, 2009.

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Images: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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The Mystery of the Missing Moon Trees

18 Feb

15 years after NASA astronomer David Williams started searching for them, hundreds of trees grown from space-faring seeds are still missing.

The “moon trees,” whose seeds circled the moon 34 times in Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa’s pocket, were welcomed back to Earth with great fanfare in 1971. One was planted in Washington Square in Philadelphia as part of the 1975 bicentennial celebrations. Another took root at the White House. Several found homes at state capitals and space-related sites around the country. Then-president Gerald Ford called the trees “living symbol[s] of our spectacular human and scientific achievements.”

And then, mysteriously, everyone seemed to forget about them.

“The careful records weren’t kept, or if they were kept they weren’t maintained,” Williams said. Williams, whose job includes archiving data from the Apollo missions, hadn’t even heard of the moon trees until a third grade teacher e-mailed him in 1996 to ask about a tree at the Camp Koch Girl Scout Camp in Cannelton, Indiana.

“No one around here had ever heard of it,” Williams said. “This is such a neat story, and no one seems to know about it.”

Williams has made it his mission to find them. For the past 15 years, he has kept a record on the web of every known tree’s location. When he started in 1996, he only knew where 22 trees were found. Now, that number has climbed to 80.

But the climb is slow. Mostly, Williams heard of new trees when a hiker or a park visitor found one and e-mailed him about it. The e-mails are ever fewer and farther between, he says.

“It’s been sort of a trickle,” he said. “Most of the easy ones, the low-lying fruit had already been gathered.”

Although most of the trees are long-lived species expected to last centuries, some have started to die off. According to Williams’ most recent tree count, 21 of the 80 known trees are dead, including the Loblolly pine outside the White House, five sycamores and two pines outside the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and one New Orleans pine that was damaged in Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s kind of sad, to see them going,” Williams said.

The trees’ poor health has nothing to do with their journey to space, Williams says.

“No one knew for sure whether being exposed to weightlessness or radiation would do something to the seeds,” he said. “They grew control trees right next to each other to see if they grew differently. But they didn’t find anything.”

The healthy trees have given rise to a crop of half-moon trees, trees grown from the seeds of a moon tree.

“There’s a lot of second generation moon trees being planted now,” Williams said. “That’s getting to the point where I can’t keep up with it.”

You can even buy half-moon seeds online and plant one in your own yard. Williams’ yard hosts a second generation moon tree, a gift from the National Arboretum.

Although Williams will keep looking, there’s no way to know when he’s found them all, he says. But at least the trees won’t be forgotten again.

“At least now there’s a permanent home for it,” he said. “It can’t be lost now. At least all the information that comes in, we have that.”

Update: If you think you’ve found a moon tree, you can contact Williams at dave.williams@nasa.gov. Check the Moon Trees website to see if your tree has been reported before.

Image: 1) The plaque labeling the moon tree at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, where Williams works. 2) NASA Goddard’s moon sycamore. (Courtesy Jay Friedlander.)

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NASA Considers Space Station Family Portrait

11 Feb

NASA is considering a plan to snap a photo of the International Space Station at its most crowded. The agency hasn’t made a decision yet — but maybe enough public support can convince them to take the most mind-blowing space photo of the Space Shuttle era.

During the final flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery, planned for late February or early March, the International Space Station will play host to a record number of spacecraft. Five new visitors from space agencies all over the world will be docked at the ISS, making the space station the heaviest and largest it has ever been.

This flight will the the one and only chance to capture this cosmic conference on film, before the shuttle is retired for good.

NASA officials are investigating a scheme in which one of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft would undock from the ISS to take the family portrait.

This historic photo op may require an in-flight game of musical chairs. The most reasonable plan, NASA officials decided in a meeting at Johnson Spaceflight Center, is for the Soyuz to undock, swing around the ISS so that the crew within can snap a photo, and then redock, requiring a dual-docking procedure to fit both the Soyuz and Discovery. Several different flight plans are being considered, and each one would give a slightly different view of the ISS.

The spacecraft that would gather to say cheese would hail from all over the world, including Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle-2, Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle-2 (named Johannes Kepler), the Italian-built Permanent Multipurpose Module (named Leonardo), the ExPrESS Logistics Carrier-4 and the Shuttle Discovery.

The procedure would be inconvenient, taking a total of 15 hours and possibly removing crew members from their posts at important moments. But the resulting photo would be one for the ages, and a fitting farewell to the Shuttle.

This wouldn’t be the first time a Soyuz has played photographer for a space station. In 1995, a Soyuz undocked from the Mir space station to photograph the undocking of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (above).

Image: Nikolai Budarin, Russian Space Research Institute, NASA

Via nasaspaceflight.com

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The NASA yard sale is awesome [Nasa]

06 Jan
You can buy the flight plan that went to the moon, a lunar meteorite, or Buzz Aldrin's 8th grade report card at an upcoming Nasa auction. If you've got cash to spare, head on over to the preview. [Via BadAstronomy.] More »
 
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Gigantic Storm With Huge Tail Erupts on Saturn

27 Dec

An enormous storm has erupted in Saturn’s northern hemisphere.

Amateurs first sighted the storm earlier this month, but the Cassini spacecraft moved into a good position on Dec. 24 to photograph it from about 1.1 million miles away. Earth received the raw and unprocessed shots today.

The storm has a huge central funnel and a long tail that sweeps around Saturn’s northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of miles. A shot in blue light (left) reveals the extent of the tail, but infrared light (right) shows detail of the storm’s amorphous core. The photos were taken exactly a month after Cassini recovered from a solar-flare-induced error that temporarily silenced the spacecraft from Nov. 2 through Nov. 24.

Saturn’s weather is complex like Jupiter’s, but it’s often difficult to see such storms beneath Saturn’s hazy outer atmosphere, wrote Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist and leader of Cassini’s imaging team, on Twitter.

Images: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Your Guide to the Darkest Day in 372 Years [Astronomy]

20 Dec
Late Monday night—well, actually, early Tuesday morning—the moon will move into the earth's shadow, causing a lunar eclipse visible to anyone in North America. Even better, it's happening on the Winter Solstice, for the first time since 1638. More »


 
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How Many Dwarfs Are There?

15 Dec
800px-EightTNOs.jpg
(Image courtesy Wikipedia)

Most people know by now that Pluto has been downgraded. Astronomers have decided that, conceptually, we should reserve the word "planet" for the small number of dominant bodies in the solar system. Pluto doesn't come close to making the cut. But it didn't just get shoved into the corner as "insignificant object," it got to be part of a brand new class of objects never before defined, the "dwarf planets."

Now, before you complain that, clearly, by virtue of the power of the English language, a "dwarf planet" must certainly be a planet first, a dwarf second, I would just like to mention two things. First all adjective noun combination in the English language are not noun first, adjective second. A matchbox car is, in fact, not a real car. It's OK if a dwarf planet is not a real planet. Second, though, I will acknowledge that the language is unfortunate and misleading. I preferred the term "planetoid" myself, rather than the (intentionally?) misleading "dwarf planet."

Still, forgetting the vagaries of language, we are left with dwarf planets which are not planets. How many are out there besides Pluto? And what is a dwarf planet? The International Astronomical Union (the group responsible for all astronomical nomenclature) has officially declared there to be five dwarf planet (in order of mass: Eris, Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, Ceres), and we are likely in for a dry spell on new dwarf planets. The preliminary searches of the sky are all but complete, and (as far as I know) no one has any new objects the size of Haumea hiding in their back pockets. We'll probably be at five official dwarf planets for a while.

Now is a good time, then, to remind ourselves what a dwarf planet really is.


When the final vote on the definition of "planet" was made, and the eight dominant bodies in the solar system were declared (quite rationally) a class separate from the others, a new class of objects was defined. The "dwarf planets" are all of those objects which are not one of the eight dominant bodies (Mercury through Neptune) yet still, at least in one way, resemble a planet. The best description I can come up with is that a dwarf planet is something that looks like a planet, but is not a planet. The official definition is that dwarf planets are bodies in the solar system which are large enough to become round due to their own gravitational attraction.


Why do astronomers care about round? If you place a boulder in space it will just stay whatever irregular shape it is. If you add more boulders to it you can still have an irregular pile. But if you add enough boulders to the pile they will eventually pull themselves into a round shape. This transition from irregularly shaped to round objects is important in the solar system, and, in some ways, marks the transition from an object which is geologically dead and one which might have interesting processes worthy of study.


[Haumea is, of course, not round, but that is only because it is spinning so fast. If you stopped it spinning it would become a sphere. That still counts.]


So how many dwarf planets are there? Five, of course. The IAU says so.


But let's ask the more scientifically interesting question: how many (non-planet) objects in the solar system are large enough to be round due to their own gravitational pull?


Still five, right?


Well, no. Here is where the IAU and reality part ways.

There are many more objects that precisely fit the definition of dwarf planet but that the IAU chosen not to recognize. But if the category of dwarf planet is important, then it is the reality that is important, not the official list. So let's examine reality.


So how many dwarf planets are there? Ceres is still the only asteroid that is known to be round. Vesta, the next largest, is close, but has a large crater blasted out of its side that makes it distinctly oblong. After that it gets complicated. All of the rest of the new dwarf planets are in the distant region of the Kuiper belt, where we can't actually see them well enough to know for sure if they are round or not.


While we can't see most of the objects in the Kuiper belt well enough to determine whether they are round or not, we can estimate how big an object has to be before it becomes round and therefore how many objects in the Kuiper belt are likely round. In the asteroid belt Ceres, with a diameter of 900 km, is the only object large enough to be round, so somewhere around 900 km is a good cutoff for rocky bodies like asteroids. Kuiper belt objects have a lot of ice in their interiors, though. Ice is not as hard as rock, so it less easily withstands the force of gravity, and it takes less force to make an ice ball round.


The best estimate for how big an icy body needs to be to become round comes from looking at icy satellites of the giant planets. The smallest body that is generally round is Saturn's satellite Mimas, which has a diameter of about 400 km. Several satellites which have diameters around 200 km are not round. So somewhere between 200 and 400 km an icy body becomes round. Objects with more ice will become round at smaller sizes while those with less rock might be bigger. We will take 400 km as a reasonable lower limit and assume that anything larger than 400 km in the Kuiper belt is round, and thus a dwarf planet. We might be a bit off in one direction or another, but 400 km seems like a good estimate.


How many objects larger than 400 km are there in the Kuiper belt? We can't answer this question precisely, because we don't know the sizes of more than a handful of Kuiper belt objects, but, again, we can make a reasonable guess. If we assume that the typical small Kuiper belt object reflects 10% of the sunlight that hits its surface we know how bright a 400 km object would be in the Kuiper belt. As of now, about 50 objects this size or larger are known in the Kuiper belt (including, of course, Eris, Pluto, Makemake, and Haumea). Our best estimate is that a complete survey of the Kuiper belt would double this number, so there are roughly 100 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt, of which 50 are currently known.


The new dwarf planets in the solar system are very different from the previous 8 planets. Most are so small that they are smaller across than the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco. They are so small that about 30,000 of them could fit inside the earth.


Does it matter how many dwarf planets we say there are?


I think the answer is "yes." If you believe that there are only 4 dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt then you place an oversized importance on those 4 objects and you get an exceedingly warped picture of what the outer solar is like. The important thing about the Kuiper belt is that beyond Neptune there are many many many objects with hundreds being large enough to be round. The four "IAU Dwarf Planets" in the outer solar system are all fascinating objects -- hey! I discovered 3 of them, I must think there are at least a little interesting -- but it would be a gross exaggeration to think of them as the only objects, or even the only important objects, in the fascinating region of space beyond Neptune.


I love dwarf planets. All hundred of them or so.




 
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Look Up!

11 Dec
Jupitermoon.jpg

Did anybody catch Mercury for the first time last night? I had just enough hazy cloud on my western horizon last night that Mercury was lost in the much. If you missed it, keep trying. And if you still can't find it, don't fret: your assignment for tonight is much, much easier.

The planets all travel around the sun in flat disk. Since we sit inside this disk too, when we go outside and look for planets they will all lie along one giant circle around us. Planets move slowly, so waiting for one of them to trace out the giant circle can take a while, but the Moon takes only a month to circle around us, so we can use it to trace the paths of the planets in the sky.

If you've been watching the moon the last few days, you have seen it climbing in the evening sky still growing towards its first quarter (which comes up on Monday - so quickly! Wasn't it a tiny sliver just days ago?).

The earthshine is fading away, as the view of the Earth from the Moon is also moving from full to third quarter.

As the moon has moved eastward, it might have been hard for you not to notice the incredibly bright star that the moon has been getting closer and closer to. It will be at its very closest on Monday night. That star is a great marker for helping you really visualize how fast the moon is moving across the sky. On Monday night, if you look right and sunset and then again a few hours later, you will even be able to notice the different positions in a single night.


That super bright star, though, is more than just a convenient sign post. And it's not a star. It's Jupiter. Jupiter! I think so many of us have gotten used to the fact that NASA and others provide us so many beautiful pictures of planets from spacecraft and telescope that we have forgotten that these things are really there, up in the sky, night after night after night.


Now that you know where Jupiter is (and, again, don't worry if you don't see it tonight; it is going to be the brightest thing gracing our evening skies for the rest of the year) you have a chance to see one of the most spectacular sights in the sky. Go back in and grab some binoculars. If you don't have binocular go back in and call your favorite present-giver and remind him or her that binoculars really would make the perfect present for you. Go back outside with your binocular and find a place where you can hold them good and steady. I like to lean against a wall, but you can try lying on the ground or setting them on a fence or anything that works for you. Now find Jupiter.


If you can get your binoculars steady enough, the disk of Jupiter will come into view. And it will clearly be a disk. Strung out in a line beside the disk will be four little orbs. Stars? Nope. Moons. These are the four moons of Jupiter that were first discovered by Galileo.

galileo.gif

On the left, close together are the oddly magnetic Ganymede and the icy ocean filled Europa, close on the right is Io, the most volcanically active place in the solar system, and furthest of all on the right is Callisto, which is, well, just Callisto.


Come back tomorrow and everything is different. There are only three moons. Io and Europa have swapped places, Callisto hasn't moved much, and Ganymede is now so close to Jupiter that you probably won't be able to see it. The next night? All different again.


If you have been paying extra close attention you might even notice that the line that the four moons make basically points in the same direction as the line that our moon is tracing across our sky. Those moons of Jupiter are in the same disk as the planets of the solar system.


This amazing sight - Jupiter and its moons dancing across the sky - is, to my mind, one of the most wonderful things you can see in the solar system, on par with the Grand Canyon or Iguazu Falls or eruptions on Kilauea. Chances are you've never seen it, but it's just outside your door. It's free. Go outside. Look up!





 
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NASA Engineer Shows YouTube “Best of the Best” Shuttle Videos

11 Dec


Matt Melis, a longtime NASA engineer, has take to the ‘Tube to show off what he calls “the best of the best” imagery from shuttle launches, including high-definition video

Melis has been in the launch analysis game for quite some time. His 45-minute tribute to space shuttle launches is incredibly educational and a fascinating watch for fans of space programs.

You’ll get to hear NASA engineers explain every imaginable detail of a shuttle launch as footage from the ground and from the shuttles themselves show what goes into the first phase of a successful space mission. You’ll get to see launches for STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions.

In short, if you’re really into space stuff, this YouTube video is the director’s commentary of your dreams.

“Photographic documentation of a space shuttle launch plays a critical role in the engineering analysis and evaluation process that takes place during each and every mission,” Melis writes on the YouTube video page.

“Motion and still images enable shuttle engineers to visually identify off-nominal events and conditions requiring corrective action to ensure mission safety and success… Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the shuttle imaging team and the 30 years of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program.”

Melis has been at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, for many years. He was part of the ballistics team that analyzed the Columbia launch accident, for example.

Here’s the full video. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Reviews: YouTube

More About: NASA, Science, shuttle launch, space, space shuttle, trending, youtube

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Saturn’s moon Rhea may have a breathable atmosphere [Future Space Colony]

25 Nov
Saturn's icy moon Rhea has an oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is very similar to Earth's. Even better, the carbon dioxide suggests there's life - and that possibly humans could breathe the air. More »
 
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